The Hindu Business Line : Beacons of hope

Is someone undertaking an indefinite fast a `hero' to his or her people because a huge `sacrifice' is being purportedly made for the general good? Ms Medha Patkar did it in connection with the Narmada dam issue sometime back, and today Ms Mamata Banerjee is in the middle of a similar exercise with regard to the Singur motor car plant of the Tatas. The intended `sacrifice' obviously is the threat to one's life which is implied in the act of going on an indefinite fast.

The problem is that while you may become a hero to your own people, to others what you are doing may be nothing more than a gimmick geared to a clear political end. There is, of course, nothing wrong in trying to do this in a democracy, but what one is trying to say here is that there are two sides to the coin. In other words, the quality of the heroism involved here is not universal.

Contrary views

Take, for example, Ms Mamata Banerjee's ongoing hunger-strike in Kolkata over the Singur issue. She does not want the Tata plant to come up there while the Left Front Government is equally adamant that it should. The Trinamul leader feels that a motor car factory spread over 1000 acres in Singur will seriously threaten food security in West Bengal and reduce the uprooted cultivators of the area to a hopelessly impoverished lot. Briefly, the Tatas should set up the plant on an alternative site, which would protect the future food security of the State.

On the other hand, the West Bengal Government feels that the plant has to come up in Singur because disturbing its location at this juncture would grievously hurt the industrial prospects of the State by sending a wrong, discouraging message to prospective investors in the State, especially at a time when no stone is being left unturned by the Chief Minister to get the State's industrial development going once again. Fresh talks on the relief provided to the displaced farmers have been proposed by the Chief Minister, but the offer has been turned down by the Trinamul leader.

Political heroism

It is certain that, with time, the entire issue on which the indefinite hunger strike has been undertaken by Ms Mamata Banerjee will get obfuscated — and with that the `hero' tag too will get lost along the way, thus underscoring once again the time-tested truth that such political `heroism' is no more than a transient phenomenon, perhaps as transient as the issues on which they are founded.

Such heroes, therefore, cannot be beacons of hope for society as a whole because, among other things, politics is fundamentally divisive. Those who are, are usually far more unobtrusive — as, for example, Kanchan Das, the pavement-dwelling rag-picker who found a bracelet worth Rs 3,500 in a wastepaper pile and turned it over to the police.

At a Kolkata Police function on Monday, the Chief Minister presented Kanchan to the audience along with her son and said: "She has a heart of gold. So, she never saw the gold jewellery she had found on the footpath as her own. She is so poor, yet she has become an example for us. In times like this, when everyone is judged by the amount of money he or she has, Kanchan has become a symbol for us. Let us celebrate such symbols in programmes like this one."

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

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